31–40 of 41 posts
I went through a placement person for my time as a consultant. He handled the accounting, medical insurance, taxes (all withholding), and paid me 70% of the bill rate. If you went full up 1099 he passed on 90%. It was a pretty nice arrangement for me at that time in my life. Do remember, many of the employees you deal with will think you are a member of the true oldest profession (Genesis 3:1).
I went through a placement person for my time as a consultant. He handled the accounting, medical insurance, taxes (all withholding), and paid me 70% of the bill rate. If you went full up 1099 he passed on 90%. It was a pretty nice arrangement for me at that time in my life. Do remember, many of the employees you deal with will think you are a member of the true oldest profession (Genesis 3:1).
Do you know how you would go about these days to find a placement person?
Question for author and others on HN: How feasible is it to have remote employees when most of your work is on embedded systems? I recently started a software consulting group with a couple of partners, and we are starting to hire. I'd like to offer remote positions, but since most of our work is on embedded systems (e.g. medical devices), I don't think this is really feasible. For any given system, there's so much p…
The machines we build are big. As in $100,000 build cost and almost half a ton of aluminum and plastic big. Obviously not something each employee can take home to work with remotely.
Since our control system hardware is pretty high level (Pentium-processor SBC scale), we have a lot of leeway in terms of footprint. So we simulate as much of the I/O as we can. This lets us do a lot of development without each developer needing the actual hardware for most testing. By abstracting the hardware away in this manner, the development becomes similar to server-type software dev that can be done on a desktop.
It doesn't solve all the problems, but we can do probably 80% of our development work on our laptops and only need to do some critical testing on the actual machine itself.
Where the need to be in the office really hits is the interactions with electrical and mechanical engineers. While they have drawing and specs in electronic format, the discussions usually rely on everyone being colocated. I've found it is very difficult to explain designs even over good video conference systems.
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No, for most of our projects, the test systems are small enough so that it's not cost-prohibitive to ship. I just know that every time we bring up a new system or board, there can be days of debugging stupid problems, and that's with everyone and all our electronics gear in the same building. You say the environment was "functional". For you, did the advantages of having the larger applicant market outweigh the disad…
For me, it's hard to say because a lot of other issues led to problems. The project had poor management overall, and we were also dealing with language barriers and vastly different timezones. I think in our case it wasn't worth it because were located in San Jose and there was plenty of talent we could have hired locally. So, if you're based somewhere crawling with tech talent and the nature of your product already…
Question for author and others on HN: How feasible is it to have remote employees when most of your work is on embedded systems? I recently started a software consulting group with a couple of partners, and we are starting to hire. I'd like to offer remote positions, but since most of our work is on embedded systems (e.g. medical devices), I don't think this is really feasible. For any given system, there's so much p…
What about having your test hardware hooked up to a development machine, that folks can VPN into? Is that even feasible?
I am the author of this article, and I'm happy to answer any questions about tech consulting right here.
Just a question on #1. What are the opportunities for a new grad going into one of these companies like Accenture, Deloitte or IBM? Do you just take a spot as a cog in the machine, or do you actually get valuable consulting/client experience?
And if you're technically good and put in the hours, and your senior manager/partner has pull among his/her peers, then you will be taken care of in raises/promotions/etc. As soon as you notice the senior management can't go to bat for you for the things you want, then IMHO you should look to make a move. Ideally you can make a move internally, but you dont want to be stuck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a question on #1. What are the opportunities for a new grad going into one of these companies like Accenture, Deloitte or IBM? Do you just take a spot as a cog in the machine, or do you actually get valuable consulting/client experience?
I have interned at PWC and Deloitte and then after graduation, I worked at Deloitte for 5 years. I found that I was able to do valuable work right after joining and even as an intern. As an intern at PWC I did ethical hacking and had a good deal of oversight, but was able to own writing up documentation and participated in client calls. For a later project that summer, I had direct client contact and was seen as a st…
Question for author and others on HN: How feasible is it to have remote employees when most of your work is on embedded systems? I recently started a software consulting group with a couple of partners, and we are starting to hire. I'd like to offer remote positions, but since most of our work is on embedded systems (e.g. medical devices), I don't think this is really feasible. For any given system, there's so much p…
I have all the usual stuff you'd need to develop / debug hardware and would be open to fly on-site every now and then too.
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Cold call. Cold talk. Networking events. Developer meetups. It's honestly so easy. Handout business cards, have a decent site with a portfolio + some sort of automated contact form, maybe even an automated quote generator. Have one buddy do all the networking and bring you clients, you do the work, make money, reinvest in remote employees, keep doing this, get an office, hire some in person staff and boom, you have a…
You make it sounds super easy. Do you have your own consultancy?